The Challenge of Technology to Moral Theology

Abstract

New technologies continue to transform society and create emergent ethical problems, but moral theology has so far contributed relatively little to debates or casuistry around these issues. In Laudato si’, Pope Francis developed a sophisticated critique of the reductive, manipulative attitudes underlying the contemporary technocratic paradigm. Many new technologies intensify the colonization of our lived experience by such worldviews. As earlier Catholic analysts of technology like Romano Guardini and Ivan Illich argued, technologies have this effect because they are tied to ways of organizing communal action through bureaucratic sociotechnical systems. This essay analyzes why moral theology in the US has not engaged these earlier critiques because of fears of Luddism, historical reasons arising from the battle over contraception, and the description of technology in the sources used by contemporary schools of moral theology. Thomism, Teilhard de Chardin, market-oriented theorists, and liberation theologians tend to see technology as neutral, a positive source of cocreation, or only problematic when deployed by certain institutions. What is needed is a more creative engagement with philosophical, theological, and social scientific critiques of technology that can lead to both a casuistry and a virtue ethic surrounding emerging technologies.